WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Donald Trump boosted a Georgia Republican candidate who refuses to disavow a white supremacist she posed with in a photograph and has seemingly promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“A big winner,” Trump said in a tweet Friday attached to a story on a pro-Trump website noting that Marjorie Taylor Greene in the heavily Republican 14th District had performed well in the primary despite having an ad banned by Facebook. “Congratulations!”
Greene, the owner of a construction company, was the leader in Tuesday’s primary but did not secure 50 percent of the vote and so is headed to a runoff against her closest rival, Dr. John Cowan, a neurosurgeon.
Greene has posed in photos with Chester Doles, a Georgia man who once was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and served a prison sentence for beating nearly to death a black man he saw in the company of a white woman. She has dismissed media queries about the photos as “silly” and “fake news.”
Greene has peddled conspiracy theories about QAnon, a complex fantasy about a group of influential pedophiles trying to bring down Trump that at times has veered into anti-Semitism. Jewish Insider uncovered a 2018 posting on a QAnon website signed by a Marjorie Greene that brought in anti-Semitic tropes accusing Jewish billionaire George Soros and the Rothschild family of being involved in the conspiracy.
The Republican Jewish Coalition told Jewish Insider this week that it would not support Greene if she won the runoff, but would not oppose her either.
In the banned Facebook ad, Greene cocks an automatic rifle and warns antifa, a group that organizes counterprotests against the far right and has become fodder for conspiracy theories peddled by Trump, not to come to her district.
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